The digital future of the book

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So, think about this: In the last 5 to 10 years the way we consume all sorts of media has changed drastically, everything, essentially, except books. From a new Business Week article:

“Every other form of media has gone digital — music, newspapers, movies,” says Joni Evans, a top literary agent who just left the William Morris Agency to start her own company that will focus on books and technology. “We’re the only industry that hasn’t lived up to the pace of technology. A revolution is around the corner.”

The idea here is that a confluence of improving hardware, reader readiness and the prevalence of digitized books are setting the stage for the digital revolution to finally reach the world of books.

In a minimal sense, the hardware already exists in the form of Treos and similar handhelds which some people find comfortable enough to use as a book delivery device, but just around the corner is “digital ink” and “e paper.” I had once thought that such technology only existed in the realm of science fiction but was surprised to find during my graduate new media journalism studies that these technologies are not far off and are much anticipated by some (and dreaded by others) in the journalism business. Between current handhelds and the “e paper” future are dedicated reader devices set to come out this year. The Business Week article references the Sony Reader, which I’ve heard is astounding in its ability to make reading off of a screen feel like reading off of a page. Last spring, Jason Kottketried out a Sony device that presumably uses similar technology and was quite taken with it. But even this will be a far cry from “e paper.” For a peek at that technology, take a look at the slideshow that accompanies the Business Week article.

The other two pieces of the puzzle – reader readiness and digitized books – are already in place. People are used to consuming their media on handheld devices and I think many, especially younger folks, would like to be able to do this more. Meanwhile, between Google and the publishing companies trying to compete with it, it seems like we’re approaching a future when all books will be available digitally.

An obvious response to all of this is to wonder whether or not the book as we know it will die. I don’t think that question is as pertinent as it seems. In all likelihood, books, like magazines and newspapers, will be marginalized somewhat, still available in their current forms, but not necessarily thought of as tethered to paper and bindings. The content, of course, will live on, and these new ways of reading books will allow them to evolve as they have evolved since words were first written on papyrus.

One side note. From the article referenced above:

George Saunders, a short story author and professor of English at Syracuse University, says he’d like a way to get his work out to readers more quickly. After the scandal broke over James Frey’s falsehoods in his hit book A Million Little Pieces, Saunders penned a humorous essay stemming from the events. It was a confession to Oprah Winfrey that all of the fiction he’d written had, in fact, been true. But Saunders had a hard time getting the piece published quickly, and now it feels dated. “There might be a different model for a literary community that’s quicker, more real-time, and involves more spontaneity,” he says.

George! Such a thing already exists. If you had a blog, you could have posted it there. (And how awesome would a blog by George Saunders be). If you don’t want to start a blog yourself, feel free to send your spur of the moment pieces my way and I’ll happily post them here for (potentially) millions and millions to see.

Update:George Saunders responds via email:

George Saunders here. Just wanted to thank you for the mention at The Millions. Great site. I’ve considered a blog but knowing how obsessive I am, worried that I might get consumed by it and my family would expire and my house crumble to dust. Plus I worry about how much I would have to pay myself to keep my blog supplied with content. My fear is that, knowing I was working for myself, I would start cheating myself, only submitting my worst pieces, then get into a labor dispute with myself and never speak to me again.

In a previous essay, I interviewed four self-published authors I admire, and I examined some of the benefits of that career path. Midway through writing the piece, I realized I'd have to continue the discussion in a second essay in order to fully explore my feelings (complicated) on the topic (multifaceted). You see, Reader, I still don't plan on self-publishing my first novel, though I don't deny the positive aspects of that choice.
Below I've outlined a few reasons behind my decision, informed by our contemporary moment. I can't predict the future, though I'm sure I'll remain comfortable with my opinions for at least another thirteen months. It's in a list format, the pet genre of the blogosphere. How else was I to keep my head from imploding?
1. I Guess I'm Not a Hater
People love to talk about how traditional publishing is dying, but is that actually true? According to The New York Times, the industry has seen a 5.8% increase in net revenue since 2008. E-books are "another bright spot" in the industry, and the revenue of adult fiction grew by 8.8% in three years. (Take that, Twilight!)
Of course, the industry has troubles. The slim profit margins of books; the problems of bookstore returns; the quandary of Borders closing and Amazon forever selling books as a loss-leader; how to make people actually pay for content, and so on. Furthermore, the gamble of the large advance strikes me as ridiculous -- and reckless, considering that editors and marketing teams have no real clue which books will be hits and which ones won't. (Still, what writer is going to kick half-a-million out of bed?) And there's the always-chilling question: With mounting pressure to turn a profit, how do editors justify publishing an amazing book that might not speak to a large audience? Talented authors -- new and mid-list -- are bound to get lost in this system.
And yet. And yet. I read good books by large publishing houses all the time, books that take my breath away, make me laugh and cry and wonder at the brilliance of humanity. I trust publishers. They don't always get it right, but more often than not, they do. As I said in the piece that started me off on this whole investigation: "I want a reputable publishing house standing behind my book; I want them to tell you it’s good so that I don’t have to."
2.I Write Literary FictionBefore you get your talons out, let me clarify: I don't consider literary fiction superior to other kinds of fiction, just different; to me, it's simply another genre, subject-wise and/or marketing-wise. Many of the writers who have found success in self-publishing are writers of straightforward genre fiction. Amanda Hocking writes young adult fantasy, dwarfs and all. Valerie Forster, who published traditionally before setting out on her own, writes legal thrillers. Romance, too, often does just fine without a publisher. Aside from Anthropology of An American Girl by Hilary Thayer Hamann, I can't think of another literary novel that enjoyed critical praise and healthy sales when self-published. That's not to say that it can't -- and shouldn't -- happen, it's only to point out that it's a tougher road for writers of certain sorts of stories. Readers like me aren't seeking out self-published books. Why not? That's for another essay. (Please, can someone else write that one?) Until the likes of Jeffrey Eugenides and Alice Munro begin publishing their work via CreateSpace, I don't see the landscape for literary fiction changing anytime soon.
3. I'd Prefer a Small Press to a Vanity PressThe conversation about self-publishing too often ignores the role of independent publishing houses in this shifting reading landscape. Whether it be larger independents like Algonquin and Graywolf, or small gems like Featherproof and Two Dollar Radio, or university presses like Lookout Books, the imprint at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, which recently published Edith Pearlman'sBinocular Vision (nominated for this year's National Book Award), independent presses offer diversity to readers, and provide yet another professional option for authors. These presses are run and curated by well-read, talented people, and they provide readers with the same services that a large press provides: namely, a vote of confidence in a writer the public might have never heard of. Smaller presses, too, enjoy a specificity of brand and identity that too often eludes a larger house.
In this terrific interview, publisher Fred Ramey of Unbridled Books puts it this way:
I believe that the iron grip that large publishers and their marketing partners have had on readers' attention since the 1990s has slipped quite a bit with the arrival of online retailers and opinion-makers. Obviously patrons of online booksellers can see the breadth of reading options - "Others who bought this item also bought...." Patrons of independent bookstores know of those options, too, and depend on the recommendations of their booksellers. The few "designated" titles from the big house are still dominant, of course, even in independent stores. But if you are an author in one of those corporations whose book has not been "designated" your reality can become pretty stark.
Independent presses can offer a real chance to a talented writer who might not fit the formulas of the big house. Yes, I know that each conglomerate has a few imprints and a good many editors dedicated to the best of books -- to maintaining the course of American letters. Those are the prestigious imprints that aren't always required to pretend the sales of a prior book predict the performance of the next book. (I'm often astounded at how willing the industry is to act as though it believes that. We all know it isn't true.) But independent presses are all dedicated to finding and presenting the best of books, dedicated to the books in and of themselves and to the promise of the authors.
A year ago, I published my novella If You're Not Yet Like Me with a tiny press called Flatmancrooked, and I consider it the highlight of my career so far. Not only did I get to work with a sharp and talented editor, Deena Drewis, and have my book designed by the press's risk-taking founder Elijah Jenkins, I also had so much fun participating in the press's LAUNCH program, where the limited first-edition went on pre-order for just a week. My book sold out in three days, and getting that first paycheck was exhilarating. My tiny book got me on a panel at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, a few awesome readings, and it even found its way to two different editors at larger houses. It became my literary calling card. When readers received my book in the mail, it was signed and numbered by me. It also came with a condom.
Flatmancrooked, sadly, closed its doors earlier this year, but Drewis has continued the LAUNCH program with her new press, Nouvella. The success of Flatmancrooked showed me that small can mean flexible and daring in its editorial and marketing choices. Small presses try things that large, established houses are too huge, and possibly too chickenshit, to even consider. The fact that Flatmancrooked is now defunct showed me that a labor of love is still a labor (especially when its laborers have other full-time jobs to go to), and that instability is unavoidable in the small press (or the small, small, small press) game.
Some writers are forever wed to the small press landscape. Others, like Blake Butler, Amelia Gray, Benjamin Percy, and Emma Straub first published with smaller outfits and have since moved onto larger houses. Perhaps the small press world is becoming the real proving ground for literary writers.
4. Self-Publishing is Better for the Already-Published
Perhaps the smarter, and far more seductive, path is the one where the writer begins his career with a traditional publisher, and then, once he's built a base of loyal readers, sets off on his own. The man who loves to talk smack about the publishing industry, J.A. Konrath, already had an audience from his traditionally-published books by the time he decided to take matters into his own hands. It's much harder to create a readership out of nothing.
I'm interested to see how Neal Pollack's latest novel, Jewball, does as a self-published book. Short story writer Tod Goldberg is also trying this approach with his new mini-collection, Where You Lived, self-published as an e-book. I don't need an intermediary to tell me about these writers because their previously published books speak for them.
5. I Value the Publishing Community
I decided to ask the most famous writer I know, Peter Straub, if he's ever considered leaving the world of big publishing and putting out a book all by his lonesome. After all, he's a bestselling author and editor of more than 25 books (18 novels alone!), and he's a horror writer beloved by genre geeks and snobby literary types alike. A few of his fans probably sport tattoos of his bespectacled face on their pecs. (Or: Peter Straub tramp stamps! Yes!) In an email response, Straub acknowledged how quickly the publishing world and our reading habits are changing, and he said he just might experiment with self-publishing short fiction in the coming years. He told me:
True self-publication means writers upload content themselves, and plenty already do it. I'm not quite sure how you then publicize the work in question, or get it reviewed, but that I am unsure about these elements is part of the reason I seek always, at least for the present, to have my work published in book form by an old-style trade publisher. The trade publisher, which has contracted for the right to do so, then brings the book out in e-form and as an audiobook, so I am not ignoring that audience.
What he went on to say gave me a special kind of hope:
Most of the editors I have worked with over the past thirty-five years have made crucial contributions to the books entrusted to them, and the copy-editors have always, in every case, done exactly the same. They have enriched the books that came into their hands. Can you have good, thoughtful, creative editing and precise, accurate, immaculate copy-editing if you self-publish? And if you can't, what is being said about the status or role of selflessness before the final form of the fiction as accepted by the audience, I mean the willingness of the author to submerge his ego to produce the novel that is truest to itself?
This -- this! -- I get. Even though my first novel was rejected by traditional publishers, one assistant editor's notes on it -- notes that were thorough, thoughtful, challenging, and compassionate -- were enough to show me that these professionals are valuable to the process of book-making. I know you can hire experienced editors and copy-editors, but how is that role affected when the person paying is the writer himself? What if the hired editor told you not to publish? Would that even happen?
6. The E-Reading Conundrum; or, I don't want to be Amazon's Bitch
Many self-published authors have gone totally electronic, eschewing print versions of their work altogether. I can't see myself taking that route, however, because I don't own an e-reader, and I don't have plans to buy one (not yet, anyway... I read a lot in the bath, etc., etc.). It seems odd that I wouldn't be able to buy my own book -- I mean, shouldn't I be my own ideal reader? I also prefer to shop at independent bookstores, and in fact, I pay full price for my books all the time. The thought of Amazon being the only place to purchase my novel shivers my timbers. I don't mind if someone else chooses to read my work electronically, just as I don't mind if Amazon is one of the places to purchase my work; I'm simply wary of Amazon monopolizing the reading landscape. Self-publishing has certainly offered an alternative path for writers, but it's naive to believe that a self-published author is "fighting the system" if that self-published book is produced and made available by a single monolithic corporation. In effect, they've rejected "The Big 6" for "The Big 1."
7. Is it Best for Readers?
In September, when my brother-in-law learned that my book still hadn't sold, he said, "Please don't self-publish!" He was actually wincing. If I did self-publish, he said, he'd buy it because we were family, but otherwise, he'd happily ignore my novel in search of something he'd read about on The Millions, or heard about on NPR, or had a friend recommend. There are simply too many books out there as it is.
Our conversation reminded me of Laura Miller's humorous and perspicacious essay, "When Anyone Can be a Published Author," in which she reminds us that the people who celebrate self-publishing often overlook what it means for book buyers and readers. She writes:
Readers themselves rarely complain that there isn’t enough of a selection on Amazon or in their local superstore; they’re more likely to ask for help in narrowing down their choices. So for anyone who has, however briefly, played that reviled gatekeeper role, a darker question arises: What happens once the self-publishing revolution really gets going, when all of those previously rejected manuscripts hit the marketplace, en masse, in print and e-book form, swelling the ranks of 99-cent Kindle and iBook offerings by the millions? Is the public prepared to meet the slush pile?
As a member of the reading public, I am not prepared, or willing, to wade through all that unfiltered literature. As a writer, I must put my head back to the grindstone and write a book that more than a handful of readers can fall in love with.
8. I'm Busy. Writing.
Today I wrote two pages of my new novel while my mother took my five-month-old son to the mall. I get twelve hours of childcare a week, and six of those are dedicated to preparing for my classes and running a private writing school. The other six hours I devote to my new novel. The old one, the one that traditional editors didn't go nuts for, is in the drawer. Some might say I've given up; I say, I'm just getting warmed up. I'm still writing, aren't I? My career isn't one book, but many. And like every other writer out there, I decide what road I want to travel.
Image credit: purplesmog/Flickr

The launch of the Sony Reader is drawing nearer, and it has garnered another mostly positive review, this time from the Washington Post. The Reader gets high marks for its look and feel, as well as its ability to increase the font size for readers with vision trouble. With "twice the pixel density of most conventional LCDs, and on a par with the resolution of newsprint," eye strain isn't a problemThe device's battery lasts for "7500 page turns," and its memory can store 80 average length books. Sony has set up a store similar to Apple's iTunes where readers can buy the books, and 10,000 titles are expected to be available at launch. Judging by the titles available for sale, the ebooks appear to fetch the same price as their paper counterparts. The device generally gets high marks, but not enough to make it worth the price tag for everyone, according to the reviewer: "Is the Reader worth $350? Only if you want to trim your luggage, stop collecting dead trees, or use the large-font feature for easier reading."Given how impressed many have been with the technology, I suspect those reasons will be enough to make the Sony Reader reasonable successful, especially if it can keep expanding its library of titles. More broadly speaking, books - the old-fashioned paper kind - are far from an endangered species, but the Reader may appeal to people for whom lugging around a bunch of books has gotten to be a pain. Were Sony to add the ability to download newspaper and magazine articles (perhaps this is in the works, I don't know), it would up the usefulness of this device considerably.According to the Web site, it looks like the Reader has begun shipping already, and is proving popular: "Due to overwhelming demand, new Sony Portable Reader orders may ship as late as mid-November," reads a notice on the site.Bonus Links: I've written about the Sony Reader and ebooks a couple of times before: The digital future of the book and The Possibility of an eBook Summer.

2 comments:

Hehe, the personalised industrial dispute. Books will never die. My State Library just told me so at the wonderful Mirror of the World exhibition (that's in Victoria,Australia, folks) – and besides, they don't need batteries or updates.

In just a dozen or so paragraphs, Tim Parks'sshort piece in praise of ebooks -- titled "E-Books Can't Burn" -- on the NYRB blog is one of the more eloquent defenses I've read of digital reading from the side of literature, rather than, say, convenience or democracy. Some of his more offhand remarks don't hold up to much scrutiny (ebooks are indestructible? Their version of permanence is different than that of printed books, but no less vulnerable.), but the idea at the core of his piece is a fascinating one, and relatively underplayed in the ongoing conversation about our new ways of reading: that the ebook, by clearing away the physical and even fetishistic trappings of the printed book, strips reading down to its essence, "the words themselves and the order they appear in:"
The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience. Certainly it offers a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us and disappearing behind us than the traditional paper book offers, giving no fetishistic gratification as we cover our walls with famous names. It is as if one had been freed from everything extraneous and distracting surrounding the text to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves. In this sense the passage from paper to e-book is not unlike the moment when we passed from illustrated children’s books to the adult version of the page that is only text. This is a medium for grown-ups.
Now, I don't find that idea fascinating only because it was my own first reaction to the Kindle when I got to test drive one a few days before it debuted back in 2007 (second reaction, actually; my first was, "Gee, a book in 20 seconds!"). There is also a great deal of truth in it, and I still think the ebook is an ideal medium for evaluating literature: a neutral playing field like the orchestra auditions that now take place behind a curtain. Ideally, prize juries should read blind (both of authors' names as well as the works' physical attributes).
But we don't only read to evaluate. We read to experience, to know, and to remember, and printed books are an aid, not a hindrance, toward those ends. One commenter on Parks's piece, before he goes off the deep end and ropes digital reading in with the soulless sexual promiscuity that's destroying our civilization, likens a relationship with a book to love:
If this 'logic' is indeed true, then by extension, why commit to any woman or man? After all, strip away the aesthetic, the 'fetishistic', and leave us 'to more austere, direct engagement' with, well, any and every being.
I'm not sure this "extension" entirely works (I'm certainly not a monogamist when it comes to reading.) but the comparison to an object of love is useful. However we might try to purify our love for someone down to its abstract essentials, that love is irretrievably (and wonderfully) contaminated by more quotidian, physical associations: a timbre of voice, a smell, an ear or a toe, a piece of clothing. Even a book your beloved once read. Those details might be said to merely evoke the love, but they also come to embody it, flesh it out. Your love has a body.
Parks argues that it's a "core characteristic" of literature as an art form that it can exist as "pure mental material, as close as one can get to thought itself. Memorized, a poem is as surely a piece of literature in our minds as it is on the page." But if a memorized poem is the purest manifestation of literature, memory itself has a rather impure relationship to the wantonly associative materials that decorate our lives and thoughts. How do we best remember poems (and why are poems easier to memorize than prose, and song lyrics easier to remember than either)? Through details like rhythm and rhyme that bear only an apparently tangential relationship to the "pure mental material" that the words express. These sorts of secondary features of language, like alliteration and puns, sometimes feel like vestigial embarrassments to the austere quest for meaning, but they are the warp and woof of language, reminders that meaning is never separate from physical embodiment.
And memory doesn't restrict its associative hunger to language. Memories survive longer, and are easier to access, when they are connected to other senses, to images, sounds, smells, tastes, and especially, as memory artists -- Joshua Foer and Tony Judt most recently among them--- have known for centuries, to spaces, to "memory palaces" that can house and organize them. Memory, in other words, thrives on fetishes, on objects that carry meaning less by essence than association. It covers the walls of its palaces with them.
And so does reading. We make sensory associations -- arbitrary but meaningful -- to our reading that house the mental images it creates. This would hardly be a respectable literary essay if I didn't declare here that literature without its fetishes is like Proust without his memory-triggering madeleine -- a passage, by the way, that I first read in the 1989 Vintage International edition of Swann's Way, a book, by the way, that I associate with the warm springtime of my senior year in college, with standing in my kitchen, a place I'm sure I didn't actually read the book, but rather held on to it as an inward symbol of my control over my reading now that my last finals were done, and as an outward badge of what I thought of as the casual sophistication of my post-college self-education (yes, it's true that readers' "fetishistic gratifications" are often as shamefully self-serving and impure as Parks says -- that's part of what makes them so memorable).
A physical book makes a house for its content, with pages like rooms we can pass through -- and return to -- in sequence, or jump among, taking shortcuts we can easily retrace because we hold the whole structure in our hands. It's true that a vivid piece of writing, read physically or digitally, creates its own mental spaces -- I have, for instance, a pretty extensive and durable image in my mind of Copper Canyon, the mine town ripe for the picking in Richard Stark'sThe Score, which I read last year on my phone -- but, perhaps because of its very tendency toward abstraction and austerity, reading thrives in the paper houses we build for it.
These houses don't have to be lovely, by the way, although it helps. This isn't really an argument about beauty, about "quality paper" or "handsome masterpieces," in Parks's words. A beautiful, well-designed book is a good thing, and I am sure the pleasure of holding my smooth and nearly weightless little Avon paperback edition of The Moviegoer enhanced my headlong love affair with that novel when I read it a couple of decades ago, just as it still enhances my memory of it (at this point, I remember the cover better than the book; or, rather, my pleasure in the cover, easily recalled, has now become the repository for all the pleasure I took in the book, the specifics of which await a more thorough rereading). But I first read and loved Moby-Dick in an ugly Norton Critical Edition, and The Confidence-Man in an even uglier Meridian paperback, each of which has nevertheless proved an equally sturdy physical structure for my memories of reading.
That's not to say that the works don't survive and transcend their material substrate. I could have read Melville anywhere -- even a Kindle -- and it would still have been Melville, though I'm not sure with quite as full a character in my mind as it has now. I've owned one of my favorite books, Housekeeping, in at least three editions (as well as on audio), and read it closely in all of them -- and it was, more or less, the same book each time, but the various editions gave it, and still give it, a place in my mind. When I recall Sylvie and Ruth burning their house -- and how breathtaking it was to read the first time -- I have an image in my mind of their wet, cluttered yard and the flaming curtains, but alongside I have an image of a page, and of an elongated, almost sprightly font that carried the good humor of the book even through its darker scenes.
Can you get that from an ebook? I think in some ways you can, though not in the austere, neutral form that Parks celebrates. I don't mean to make a fetish out of printed books, and I'm not asking to burn (or delete) ebooks, or their devices. Maybe all I ask is that digital books be designed in ways that give them character, that help them live and survive individually in your mind, rather than being translated into a common, anonymous display that passes through your memory as quickly as you scroll. Or maybe I suggest that you read your digital books in a way that embeds them in your life and in your sensory memory: on a newly mown lawn, or in the stale surroundings of a passenger train, or with a cup of tea and a small cake for dipping, or while sitting with someone you love. Any way, really, that keeps your books from being entirely pure, gets them a little dirty and adulterated.
And as for physical books: I'd just like them to survive, or at least be remembered, and not just as the playthings of a child.
Image Credit: Flickr/Kodomut

I.The other day, while looking for books to buy my future nephew, I recalled The Real Mother Goose, a classic I had loved as a kid. I could conjure the cover, with its illustration of a witch and a baby, riding a giant, flying bird (a goose, I guess). And the border was checkered - the squares were black and white. I remembered the size of the book in my small hands, and the texture of its cover, and the thickness of the pages inside. It thrilled me to think that my sister's son might hold this book, and love it, like I had.For a period, novelist Katherine Taylor brought The Mystery Guest by Gregoire Bouillier to dinner parties. "Wine is boring," she told me. "Books last longer." Later, she took to giving everyone Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk, which, she said, "is not as dinner-party appropriate, but it was a gorgeous and largely overlooked book I thought my clever friends should read." Now Ms. Taylor has moved onto handing out Maurice Sendak'sThe Nutshell Library.My husband and I met and became friends in the summer of 2000 as coworkers at Book Soup. At the end of the summer, when I was due to return to Oberlin College in Ohio, he gave me a copy of Goodbye Columbus. On the first page, he had written a note: "Edan - For the summer. Thanks. Patrick." Of course we got married.I love giving and getting books as gifts, and I've been wondering lately how the digital age will alter this ritual. Don't get me wrong: I am not against the electronic book. As others have pointed out, ebooks will most likely inspire consumers to be more adventurous in their reading tastes. Nothing will go out of print, and the convenience is obvious. (I kind of want to read Infinite Jest on my iPhone - imagine how light it would be. Wait a minute... I don't have an iPhone!) Once DRM goes away, and it will, the pass-it-on aspect of books will just explode. Book as mp3. Book as gossip. (If only that sexual astrology paperback we passed around in ninth grade had been digital...) In general, the ebook is a good thing for readers and writers. I prefer reading paperback novels, but if someone wants to read the book I'm writing on a fancy device, that sounds okay.So, let me make this clear: I'm not announcing the purity of print books over their digital brethren. I don't want to wax poetic (not too much, anyway) about the sensual pleasures of print books, how they feel and smell, the weight of them - although that must account for something, because what fun will it be to receive an ebook for your birthday? Will anyone even bother? The emergence of a new technology implies the death of another, and the rise of the ebook could mean that no one will ever again give you a novel for hosting a dinner party. I think I'm in mourning.II.Why do people give books as gifts, anyway? I don't mean just any book, but a specific book. Why did Patrick give me that copy of Philip Roth's first novel? What did it imply?Last week, a woman came into the bookstore to get a copy of A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter. She said she always gives it as a gift to people she's getting to know. Those who love the novel as much as she does become her friends for life.I have a friend who likes to give Milan Kundera'sThe Unbearable Lightness of Being to women he's interested in romantically. I told him he shouldn't be dating anyone who hasn't already read it.For many of us, books are cultural signifiers: if you like this, you will like that, and I will like you. A book serves as an aesthetic litmus test, a conversation starter, a way to understand one another through a third party. The act of giving someone a book is an important performance; it's not just the book, but the exchange itself, and that's why a digital copy won't mean as much. You could email someone a love letter, but if you write it by hand... Well then.So, this: Reading is both a public and private act. It's private in the sense that no amount of discourse can mirror or capture the intimate experience a reader has with a book and its author. But that discourse is precisely why it's public - the blog posts, the reviews, the conversations over coffee, all of that affects and informs your reading experience. When you give someone a book you love, you're inviting them to understand a private encounter you had with a text. It's the fusing of the public and the private, the social and the intimate.III.I've recently realized that I'm also mourning reading in public, because e-readers will change that game as well. If a book is a cultural signifier, then the act of reading a book in public conveys important information to other readers. I always check out what people are reading: in coffee houses, at the beach, in bars, on airplanes. I am taking note, I am building a reader's identity. It's like - what kind of jeans is your soul wearing? It saddens me deeply to think about how this kind of signal will be lost with the popularity of ebook devices. What can an anonymous Kindle tell me about your inner life, and about what entertains you?Of course, the privacy of an e-reader is appealing, too. There are times when I want my private experience of reading to be just that - private. With a Kindle, I could read Stephenie Meyer on the bus without embarrassment. When I'm reading David Foster Wallace on my (nonexistent) iPhone, I won't have to worry about some geeky douchebag hitting on me.Again, I see the value of this new technology. I get it. I just can't seem to let go of what will be lost...